On Illness

However cliched it may sound, illness always has the potential to be a blessing. For like all forms of communication from our Creator, illness is telling us certain things in certain ways. It may be telling us to slow down and to live life less hectically. It may be telling us that we are not eating healthily, or sleeping enough, or getting the amount of exercise that we need to remain healthy. Depending on its seriousness, it may be telling us that a complete 'life overhaul' is necessary. But whatever it is telling us on the level of specifics, there is a general message that comes with all illness, and that message is, quite simply, that we are, at base, impotent beings who are at every instant dependent on God's grace and loving attention for the continuation of our existence. Illness comes with the reminder that everything we are, and everything we have, depends on His love and generosity: who we are, and what we appear to possess, depends solely on His will.



Illness, therefore, can be a blessed wake-up call, halting us in our tracks in order to give us the time and situation necessary for stock-taking and worshipful reflection of our life situation and its attendant duties. Illness, seen as a blessing, inevitably turns out to be such. This treatise shows us a number of reasons why this is so.



Bediuzzaman Said Nursi’s treatise On Illness is presented here in its new English translation with a focus on the communication of meaning rather than on strict, word-for-word equivalence, which often obscures what the author is trying to say and makes reading more of a task for the reader than a pleasure.